God and Jetfire (37 page)

Since they were already living out of suitcases, Paula and Erik accepted my grandmother's invitation and drove down to Maryland. When they arrived, the quiet brick sunroom grew noisy with kids and dogs, people greeting one another and the door swinging open and closed.

“Come over here and say hello!” my grandmother called to Jonathan from her recliner. Jonathan smiled and kept his distance, close to Erik. Erik pushed him forward, and he stood stock-straight beside her.

“Hel-lo!” my grandfather said to him, like he was speaking to a puppy, bowing his head and lifting his hand in a low wave that worked double-duty, as a greeting and to stop anyone from responding.

“Jonathan, tell Grandma about your birthday party!” I suggested. Paula said they'd watched a Star Wars DVD and eaten off of Star Wars paper plates. But Jonathan just swung his shoulders and looked at me.

*   *   *

My sister pushed the squeaky door open, carrying Abigail in her arms. Her white-blond boy, now more than two years old, slipped inside after her and stood in front of Jonathan. I thought maybe in this moment everyone would see: what we all understand instinctively about what Jacob means to the family is true of my son, too. Jonathan's towering height over Jacob might prove that all those meanings were actually five years more true of Jonathan. Jonathan was five years more of a grandson; he had five years more capacity to carry the family history. But mostly I hoped my sister would see our sons and remember.

Half an hour of hospitality was all my grandmother could substain before she encouraged us to go entertain ourselves. We caravanned to Harpers Ferry to take a walk and enjoy the sunset. We got big, expensive ice cream cones, and when Andrew dropped his on the brick sidewalk, Paula grabbed the empty cone out of his hand, scooped up the splattered ice cream, and handed it back to him before he had registered the loss. She looked away and swung her arms and continued walking. My mother laughed and laughed and retold the story many times to everyone who hadn't witnessed it.

When we drove to dinner, Jonathan rode in the car with my family. I sat in the middle in the back, between him and my mother, and I can't remember how it started, but Jonathan and I started tickling each other. We knew each other's ticklish spots and how to get at them, and he laughed so hard he couldn't make a sound. We forgot whose fingers were whose as we grabbed at them, twenty too-long fingers flailing for our lives. We thumb wrestled and arm wrestled, and when we got to the restaurant we tapped each other's toes under the table.

The next morning, we all met for a picnic before going our separate ways. A little place in the woods close to Harpers Ferry, where there was a pond, and a dock, and a place to sit and eat. The pond was full of algae, and my brother and the kids began fishing it out with long sticks. They lay down on the dock to reach farther out and collected gooey piles of it. Jacob watched Jonathan closely, like a container he would soon crawl into. Jonathan taught him how to say
ribbit!
They jumped down the length of the dock, leaping and squatting, leaping and squatting.
Ooh ooh ooh!
Jonathan said, hunching over like a chimpanzee, and Jacob tried to imitate him.

I was the photographer, documenting every combination of our ever-expanding family: Paula with Julie and her new baby. Andrew and Jacob, chasing my brother and Jonathan. My mother, eating her sandwich and chatting with Erik. My father, trying to show them all, again, how to skip rocks across the pond. When we said goodbye, Jonathan approached Jacob to give him some jelly beans we bought in Harpers Ferry. You could tell Jacob was flattered. He leaned in to give Jonathan a kiss, but Jonathan just watched with interest from above. It landed near his belly button.

*   *   *

That night, my sister and I stayed awake talking after her kids were asleep. I told her I wished that someone had taken a picture of me with my son when we were all at the pond. I had a lot of pictures of him from my trips to North Carolina, but since the day I signed the papers, when Paula snapped pictures of my sister and me, swollen-faced with Jonathan in my arms just outside of the conference room where I'd signed, I didn't have any of us together. I'd left the pond with a hundred photographs of an afternoon during which I didn't seem to be present at all.

I hadn't said anything at the time because I wanted someone else to think of it. At least as much as I wanted that picture, I wanted someone else to consider how much a picture like that would mean to me.

My sister's face turned red as she remembered.

*   *   *

And I remembered I was alone in all of this. It wasn't a burden I would ever share. My grandmother wasn't scheming to get him back, and my sister had all but forgotten that distant day. I'd always be the photographer in my family, and no paper world where my son was locked in my arms could give me what I really wanted. But after that, I found it hard to hear about my sister's children. I quit calling her on Mother's Day; I forgot her kids' birthdays. And I began to refer to Jonathan as
my son
. Not the name his parents had given him, but the nameless thing he had always been to me, the child who wasn't mine to name.

*   *   *

I returned to California for my last month there. It was fall; there were wrinkles in weather that made short-lived shadows where you could try to plant your memories. When the light fell long that October, and I began to see the subtle signs of fall in the sycamores, I felt the sweetness of familiarity, but I wouldn't presume to know what season it really was, or when it would pass. On one of those last afternoons, basking in the sunlight I was sad to be leaving, across a crowded field of hipsters, I spotted a boy. Tight red pants, tight red shirt, and a blue bandana, rolled around his neck. We didn't make eye contact, but I knew we would meet. I would sit in the park until we did. And soon he was there, squatting beside me and offering me a Popsicle he said his mate didn't want. Australian. No, Irish. He was done with San Francisco, too, heading to Berlin. Jevn was right, every ending is a beginning. Those last days in California would feel like the beginning of everything. Lying in a loft with him, watching
The Silence of the Lambs
, his dog, Reginauld, resting between us and him reveling in every moment I buried my head in his chest for protection. Waking with a distant window's light framing a pure blue Oakland sky. We said goodbye to California and then to each other, and I landed in New York in time for a real winter.

 

TWENTY-NINE

“Breathe, Seekie,” Caleb said as he threw my bag into the trunk. We were double-parked in front of our apartment in Brooklyn.

“I know, it's just Paula said he'd be finishing his Little League game at noon, and I want to get there. It takes longer than Google Maps says.”

We were borrowing my sister's old Saturn for a few weeks as we got to know New York. We'd taken a couple of weekend trips along the East Coast, and that Saturday morning we were on our way to see Jonathan. We pulled the heavy doors closed and settled in with Reginauld in the backseat. Caleb started the car. “
Breathe
,” he said.

Jevn had told me the same thing. My piano professor had said it, too. Boys were always telling me to breathe. I knew there was something to it. In childbirth, breathing was a way of moving forward in the face of unbearable pain. In the conservatory, breathing let you bypass your brain, taking inexpressible complexities into your body, and letting them right back out into the world, through your hands. My professor would sit beside me, reading the music as I silently inhaled leather and worn felt in the soundproof chamber of his studio in the east wing of Memorial Hall. I would gaze across the couch, over the Buddha, and out the windows toward my high-rise dorm, which was always casting a shadow over the conservatory.

I thought music school would be a kind of arrival; I thought we would finally get to play the most sophisticated pieces of piano literature, like the
Gaspard de la Nuit
, or the
Arietta
of Beethoven's last piano sonata, which my teacher in Tennessee said I was too young to play. He said Beethoven was transcribing the sound of heaven as he approached it, and without some “life experience” you couldn't possibly make sense of it, no matter how easily you could read the notes. I took it as a challenge and practiced it secretly at home, feeling like I was stealing a surreptitious glimpse through the gates. But at conservatory we played only the most straightforward pieces, sometimes ones we'd mastered as children, and we had to play slowly, half tempo and less, accounting not just for the initiation of every note, but for the timing and nature of every release.

Some professors advocated long hours of practice, but mine didn't want me to touch the piano without care. He thought endless scales and arpeggios only taught your fingers not to feel. Every time you approach the piano, he said, you should be fully present and paying attention, even if that meant playing less and longing more. And I wasn't to touch the keys until I had
breathed
the music.

I would close my eyes uncomfortably and inhale; a pause midair before falling. I'd exhale the first phrase of the Brahms, imagining the restraint of pressing my fingers bluntly into soil. I would sink into the thick cushion of the bench, arching my spine intermittently in a slow rhythm, then lift my chest, rising again, taut, from my sacrum. The phrasing would come from my expanded lungs, not from my fingers, flailing to find the notes. Breathing was a way to embody movements and meanings too complex for thinking.

*   *   *

“He doesn't care about all your agonizing, complicated shit,” Caleb said. “Just make sure when you're around, it's fun. That's what he'll remember.” We found the highway and merged into traffic.

After we left California, Caleb spent a few months in Berlin before deciding to join me in New York, arriving sweetly on Valentine's Day but then playing it off as coincidence. His advice, simple as it was, was born of experience; I wanted to rub it like a rough sponge across all my jagged thinking and let its simplifying action simplify all the parts of everything. His life had been spread haphazardly across three continents, his passport taken by one parent, then he himself taken by the other; parents' lovers arrived and departed through his childhood, and he was the only one in his entire family who ended up with his last name—but despite the odds, he had come out
Solid. Gold
. That's at least what our relationship therapist said. We were seeing her because I wanted to be talking about marriage and Caleb thought we were already married, by virtue of living together and having his dog and my cat (whom he called “the kids”) and being okay with having babies if that came to pass and being in all other ways happily committed.

Caleb would comment charmingly on our therapist's new hairstyle, ask her about her vacation and each of her sons, and she always came to his defense during our sessions. She challenged me about why I was in such a rush to settle down and why I doubted him. She questioned my desire for children, and I'd find myself unable to give a convincing explanation. I loved Caleb, I was finally ready, and I was thirty-two—soon it would be too late. Walking up the stairs out of her basement office onto the street, Caleb would draw a fist in to his chest. “
Yessss!
Won that round.”

He was an accident, too, of his parents' brief romance in Miami. He grew up in Liverpool, and he occupied his space on earth without budging. When people bumped into him on the sidewalk or cut him off, he might grab them gently by their shoulders—“Pardon me, dear”—and smile, stabilizing them, as though it might have been his fault. “D'ya see that?” he'd say afterward, incredulous. “Ran right into me! Dozy cow.” As a child of a very broken and reattached and broken again and stolen-away family, he said it had meant a lot to have good memories with someone, even if that someone didn't marry his mother or stay for long. He still remembered the little gifts his mother's lovers gave.

I had a knack for finding the boys whose lives made my decision seem weak. Boys raised by single mothers who'd made great sacrifices to raise them. Boys who had good manners pounded into them because their mothers couldn't afford for them to turn out bad. They grew up with a sense of reality, their own two feet, precarious, on the ground. And they found their own strength early, inside.

“You have to visit him more,” Caleb said, definitively. “Once every two months.”

“I know; we're going right now!”

“But you can't just jump in and have it all your way, Seekie.”

I looked out the window; it didn't feel like it was all my way. Even if I saw him every day, he would not be my son, and it would not be my way. But I should try to see the good things about our distance, whether I was in California or New York: every time we met, we had the freshness and curiosity of new friends, and my feeling for him would never be tarnished by the dull daily habit of parenting. Caleb was right; I inhaled the complexity.

“He was excited to hear you're coming,” I said, being positive. Paula had told me as much, when I asked her if it was all right to bring Caleb. “He got the idea that you'd have more to show him on the skateboard than I would!”

“Fancy that.”

Caleb would be my first boyfriend to meet Jonathan. He was also the first one to really understand and accept that my son, even in his absence, was a part of me. On our first date after meeting in San Francisco, Caleb stopped along a sidewalk where someone had set out records to be taken. He began carefully perusing them and handed a few to me. “For your son,” he said. And then I remembered our dinner conversation, and that I'd mentioned, in passing, the record player I'd bought for Jonathan.

I was excited for them to meet; I thought Caleb might make it easier, show me how to be, or start conversations with my son I wouldn't think of.